Sales of Neil Diamond's 1969 classic "Sweet Caroline" are up and astounding 597 percent this week in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, according to Billboard. Diamond was on hand last week for the Red Sox's first game at Fenway since the attack to perform the song during it's traditional 8th inning airing for the team.

Nielsen SoundScan posted that Diamond sold 19,000 tracks this week, 2,800 tracks the previous week, with a total of 1.75 million tracks to date. The song, which has been an incredible source of pride and joy for Boston since it became a Fenweay tradition a decade ago, was played in honor of Boston at various games since the tragedy -- including the Sox's arch rivals, the New York Yankees.

Neil Diamond explained that having early pop success almost came at the cost of finding his true voice as a singer-songwriter: "You had to have a continual string of hits. They wanted me to keep writing and re-writing 'Cherry, Cherry,' because they had had such success with it and I wasn't able to. I didn't know how to begin to rewrite 'Cherry, Cherry.' I needed to write something else. I was. . . I was a songwriter and it was my job to imagine some other wonderful song."